Automatic discovery and configuration for third-party applications in Kubernetes 🔗
You can use automatic discovery and configuration to find third-party applications (such as databases and web servers) running in your Kubernetes environment. Automatic discovery gathers telemetry data from these applications and sends it to Splunk Observability Cloud.
Note
Update the Collector to version 0.94.0 and higher to activate automatic service discovery.
How automatic discovery works 🔗
When you run the Collector with automatic discovery, it tests built-in configurations for supported metric receivers against endpoints discovered on your platform by observer extensions. This happens before starting the Collector service.
For any dynamically instantiated receiver that retrieves metrics matching the success criteria, the Collector translates the discovery configuration to a receiver creator instance with the known working rules, as well as the required observer extension. See Receiver creator receiver for more information. At the same time, the Collector adds the configuration to the metrics pipeline at runtime.
For any receiver that can establish a connection with a service, but not receive the expected metrics, discovery mode suggests which properties to set, or what extensions or settings to configure on the service to successfully retrieve telemetry. You can define any target-specific configuration values that are required, for example authentication information, using discovery properties to tune the discovery process.
When running in Kubernetes, discovery mode tests bundled metric receiver configurations against the endpoints discovered by the k8s_observer observer. Successfully discovered instances are then incorporated in the existing service configuration.
Deploy the Collector with automatic discovery 🔗
You can configure the DaemonSet from the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector for Kubernetes to run in discovery mode. Edit the properties to add required credentials or service-specific information.
The following example shows how to activate discovery mode in the Helm chart and adds authentication properties for PostgreSQL service discovery:
agent:
#...
discovery:
enabled: true # Turned off by default
properties:
extensions:
k8s_observer:
config:
auth_type: serviceAccount # Default auth_type value
receivers:
postgres:
config:
# Environment variables populated by secret data
username: '${env:POSTGRES_USER}'
password: '${env:POSTGRES_PASSWORD}'
tls:
insecure: true
# ...
extraEnvs:
# Environment variables using a manually created secret
- name: POSTGRES_USER
valueFrom:
secretKeyRef:
name: postgres-monitoring
key: username
- name: POSTGRES_PASSWORD
valueFrom:
secretKeyRef:
name: postgres-monitoring
key: password
To check discovery progress and statement evaluations, see the agent startup logs or use kubectl. For example:
$ kubectl -n monitoring logs splunk-otel-collector-agent | grep -i disco
Discovering for next 10s...
Successfully discovered "postgresql" using "k8s_observer" endpoint "k8s_observer/e8a10f52-4f2a-468c-be7b-7f3c673b1c8e/(5432)".
Discovery complete.
Note
By default, the docker_observer and host_observer extensions are turned off for discovery in the Helm chart.